Read Online The Rights Revolution by Michael Ignatieff - Free Book Online

was intended to abridge their rights as a group. In an attempt to secure the consent of Quebec to the 1982 constitution, the federal and provincial governments agreed at Meech Lake to a deal that would have recognized the distinctiveness of Quebec society and guaranteed its rights to self-government in language and other areas essential to its cultural survival. The deal was turned down by English-Canadian voters and legislatures because it appeared to give privileges to Quebec not granted to other provinces, and because the deal appeared to neglect the demands of aboriginal groups. In 1992 at Charlottetown, a constitutional deal that sought to protect the group rights of both aboriginal peoples and Quebecers also failed to win support in a nationwide referendum. A majority of English Canadians believed that the entrenchment of group rights would balkanize the country, while a majority of Quebecers believed that the rights enshrined in the deal did not protect their essential interests.
    The issue of whether group rights should prevail overindividual ones, and the larger issue of whether Canada is a single political space or a multiplicity of national spaces, has proved irresolvable. In this situation of total impasse, a 1995 proposal by the Quebec government that the nation be dissolved altogether lost a referendum in the province by fewer than 60,000 votes. 17 Since that “near-death experience,” the only consensus to emerge is that we should postpone everything — whether it be separation or a renewed union — until we have all thought further. The fervent desire to find either common ground or the terms of divorce has been replaced by a tacit contract of mutual indifference.
    The whole story may be taken as a parable about the futility of rights talk itself. The minute groups start claiming rights, self-righteousness begins and conflicts become irreconcilable. Nations can’t survive too much self-righteousness. Indeed, if a nation were only a community of rights-bearers, it wouldn’t survive at all. Happily, nations are more than a tissue of rights. They are highly complex divisions of labour, and as Adam Smith taught us, people collaborate with each other without intending to benefit the country, indeed without intending any other benefit than their own interest. If we think of Canada not just as a rights community, but as a division of labour, a highly efficient economic machine held together by millions of financial, social, and technological connections, we feel better immediately. We may not agree with each other, but we do know how to work together. So our arduous constitutional experience has taught us that countries can endure and cohere, evenon the edge of a rights precipice. That should teach us that what holds us together is deeper than rights and constitutions and political deals in backrooms. We are held together by what we do every day. We’re also held together by memory, and by the attachments to land and neighbourhood, people and places that are dear to us. These ties are deep, and so there is no reason to despair. We simply agree to disagree.
    Yet we do need to find a better way to resolve our rights conflicts. We need to find a way to reconcile the green-baize vision of our country — as a community of rights-bearing equals — with the patchwork-quilt vision of our land as a network of overlapping forms of self-government.
    Though these are competing visions, they are not impossible to reconcile in practice. Group rights that do respect individual rights of exit and the rights of minorities within the group never pose a problem. Quebec language legislation is actually a model of a conscientious attempt by two language communities to work out a reasonable
modus vivendi.
Of course, the larger issue of Quebec’s future within the Canadian federation remains unresolved, and I will discuss this in my final lecture, but for the moment I simply want to make the point that where conflicting visions of